OpenTopography Bulk Download

This resource provides bulk downloads of lidar point cloud data from datasets hosted by OpenTopography. It is designed for advanced users seeking to download large amounts of data quickly and who have the bandwidth, expertise, and software necessary to manage the gigabytes of data available. We expect that users accessing bulk data have the ability to automate downloads from the command line via tools such as wget, curl, or a download manager such as DownThemAll

Each dataset directory contains all of the point cloud data for a given data collection and are typically organized into tiles (e.g., 1 km2 tiles) and provided in the lossless LASZip format for download efficiency. When possible, a README file in the directory describes the dataset organization and other important information. Metadata for all datasets can be accessed via the OpenTopography Metadata page and users should consult the collection survey report for additional information on data organization, file naming conventions, coordinate systems, etc.

By accessing data via OpenTopography you agree to acknowledge OpenTopography and the dataset source as specified in the dataset metadata and on OpenTopography's data acknowledgement page in publications, presentations, and other materials produced using these data.

Pahrump Valley: California/Nevada State Line

NCALM. PI: Brian Wernicke, Caltech and Bernard Guest, University of Calgary. The survey area consisted of three 500 meter wide corridors near the California-Nevada border and across the Pahrump Valley. The corridors total approximately 60 km long, 0.5 to 1 km wide and contained approximately 40 square km. Please note that the flight was conducted in an unconventional way as this was an add-on to other work and was done to quickly obtain data for the requested area. Rather than flying a regular, straight grid across the area, the airplane banked along the determined trajectory. This way of gathering data introduces noticeable error, especially on the fringes of the flight path, giving a "corduroy" appearance to the data. This is in addition to the background periodic fine scale elevation variation (normally 5 to 20cm) which is a property of the Optech LIDAR system, and within the machine's error limits. This effect is less noticeable in Corridor 1 as the plane was following a mostly straight trajectory. Our understanding is that if these preliminary data looked promising, a carefully planned survey would then be conducted if funding became available. Bare-earth extraction was not performed on this dataset due to the scarceness of vegetation in the interest area. Filtering the data with a conservative feature preserving algorithm (Hagerud) can remove some of the vegetation but with the expense of smoothing out some of the morphology in steep areas.

These options allow users to describe and keep track of their jobs. Information entered below is recorded along with other job parameters in your personal lidar Job archive accessed via myOpenTopo (available only to registered OpenTopography users).